“His mother was a sad soul who used to fuss at him and worry about him a lot. She’d bring her troubles to the Mrs. and talk and talk—but I think really she’d have been relieved to have him off her mind.
“His father was a prize crab, an ex-army officer forever registering complaints—he had a little notebook for them. But half the time he was feuding with me and the Mrs., wouldn’t give us the time of day—or of course ask it. I know he’d have been happy to see his loud-mouthed dumb son drop out of sight.
“Well, one day the kid comes down to me here with a smart-ass grin and says, ‘Mr. Clancy, you’re the one who’s so great, aren’t you, on chasing winos and hookers out of here, not letting them freeload in the halls for a minute? Then how come you let—’
“ ‘Go on,’ I tell him, ‘what do you know about hookers?’
“But that doesn’t faze him, he just goes on (he was copying his father, I think, actually), ‘Then how come you let this skinny little hooker in a black fur coat wander around the halls all the time, trying to pick guys up?’
“ ‘You’re making this up,’ I tell him flat, ‘or you’re imagining things, or else one of our lady tenants is going to be awful sore at you if she ever hears you’ve been calling her a hooker.’
“ ‘She’s nobody from this building,’ the kid insists, ‘she’s got more class. That fur coat cost money. It’s hard to check out her face, though, because she never looks at you straight on and she’s got this black hat she hides behind. I figure she’s an old bag—maybe thirty, even—and wears the hat so you can’t see her wrinkles, but that she’s got a young bod, young and wiry. I bet she takes karate lessons so she can bust the balls of any guy that gets out of line, or maybe if he just doesn’t satisfy her—’
“ ‘You’re pipe-dreaming, kid,’ I tell him.
“ ‘And you know what?’ he goes on. ‘I bet you she’s got nothing on but black stockings and a garter belt under that black fur coat she keeps wrapped so tight around her, so when she’s facing a guy she can give him a quick flash of her bod, to lead him on—’
“ ‘And you got a dirty mind,’ I say. ‘You’re making this up.’
“ ‘I am not,’ he says. ‘She was just now up on Ten before I came down and leering at me sideways, giving me the come on.’
“ ‘What were you doing up on Ten?’ I ask him loud.
“ ‘I always go up a floor before I buzz the elevator,’ he answers me quick, ‘so’s those old dames won’t know it’s me and buzz it away from me.’
“ ‘All right, quiet down, kid,’ I tell him. ‘I’m going up to Ten right now, to check this out, and you’re coming with me.’
“So we go on up to Ten and there’s nobody there and right away the kid starts yammering, ‘I bet you she picked up a trick in this building and they’re behind one of these doors screwing, right now. Old Mr. Lucas—’
“I was really going to give him a piece of my mind then, tell him off, but on the way up I’d been remembering that girl of Stensor’s who lingered behind, maybe for a long time, if there was anything to what the other guy told me. And somehow it gave me a sort of funny feeling, so all I said was something like ‘Look here, kid, maybe you’re making this up and maybe not. Either way, I still think you got a dirty mind. But if you did see this hooker and you ever see her again, don’t you have anything to do with her—and don’t go off with her if she should ask you. You just come straight to me and tell me, and if I’m not here, you find a cop and tell him. Hear me?’
“You know, that sort of shut him up. ‘All right, all right!’ he said and went off, taking the stairs going down.”
“And did he disappear?” Ryker asked after a bit. He seemed vaguely to remember the youth in question, a pallid and lumbering lout who tended to brush against people and bump into doorways when he passed them.
“Well, you know, in a way that’s a matter for argument,” Clancy answered slowly. “It was the last time I saw him—that’s a fact. And the Mrs. never saw him again either. But when she asked his mother about him, she just said he was off visiting friends for a while, but then a month or so later she admitted to the Mrs. that he had gone off without telling them a word—to join a commune, she thought, from some of the things he’d been saying, and that was all right with her, because his father just couldn’t get along with him, they had such fights, only she wished he’d have the consideration to send her a card or something.”
“And that was the last of it?” Ryker asked.
Clancy nodded slowly, almost absently. “That was damn all of it,” he said softly. “About ten months later the parents moved. The kid hadn’t turned up. There was nothing more.”
“Until now,” Ryker said, “when I came to you with my questions about a woman in black—and on Three at that, where this Stensor had lived. It wasn’t a fur coat, of course, and I didn’t think of her being a hooker—” (Was that true? he wondered) “—and it brought it all back to you, which now included what the young man had told you, and so you checked out the floors and then very kindly told me the whole story so as to give me the same warning you gave him?”
“But you’re an altogether different sort of person, Mr. Ryker,” Clancy protested. “I’d never think— But yes, allowing for that, that about describes it. You can’t be too careful.”
“No, you can’t. It’s a strange business,” Ryker commented, shaking his head, and then added, making it sound much more casual, even comical, than he felt it, “You know, if this had happened fifty years ago, we’d be thinking maybe we had a ghost.”
Clancy chuckled uneasily and said, “Yeah, I guess that’s so.”
Ryker said, “But the trouble with that idea would have been that there’s nothing in the story about a woman disappearing, but three men—Stensor, and the man who lived alone, and the young man who lived with his parents.”
“That’s so,” Mr. Clancy said.
Ryker stirred himself. “Well, thanks for telling me all about it,” he said as they shook hands. “And if I should run into the lady again, I won’t take any chances. I’ll report it to you, Clancy. But not to the Mrs.”
“I know you will, Mr. Ryker,” Clancy affirmed.
Ryker himself wasn’t nearly so sure of that. But he felt he had to get away to sort out his impressions. The dingy silvery walls were becoming oppressive.
Ryker made his walk a long one, brisk and thoughtful to begin with, dawdling and mind-wandering to finish, so that it was almost sunset by the time he reentered the apartment tree (and our story), but he had his impressions sorted. Clancy had—possibly—given the Vanishing Lady a history, funny to start with (that “hookers’ convention”!) but then by stages silly, sad, sinister. Melancholy, moody, and still mysterious.
The chief retroactive effect of Clancy’s story on his memories of his own encounters with the Vanishing Lady had been to intensify their sexual color, give them a sharper, coarser erotic note—an Ultrabooth note, you could say. In particular Ryker was troubled that ever since hearing Clancy narrate the loutish youth’s steamy adolescent imagining that his “little hooker” had worn nothing but black stockings and a garter belt under her black fur coat, he was unable to be sure whether he himself had had similar simmering fantasy flashes during his encounters with her.
Could he be guilty, at his age, he asked himself, of such callow and lurid fantasies? The answer to that was, of course, “Of course.” And then wasn’t the whole romantic business of the Vanishing Lady just a retailoring of Ultrabooth to his own taste, something that made an Ultrabooth girl his alone? Somehow, he hoped not. But had he any real plan for making contact with her if she ever did stop vanishing? His unenterprising behavior when he’d had the chance to get into the elevator with her alone, and later the chance to get off the elevator at the same floor as she, and today the opportunity to meet her face to face on the third floor, indicated clearly that the answer to that question was “No.” Which depressed him.